Dräger announced that the All Hazards Training Center at The University of Findlay in Findlay, Ohio, known to industry as Findlay All Hazards, has chosen Dräger to provide safety equipment and training expertise to support Findlay’s professional and academic programs.

Opioid use in the United States is increasing dramatically. The effects of increased encounters with opioids on law enforcement and first responders can be deadly. According to the United States Drug Enforcement Administration, “Since fentanyl can be ingested orally, inhaled through the nose or mouth, or absorbed through the skin or eyes, any substance suspected to contain fentanyl should be treated with extreme caution as exposure to a small amount can lead to significant health-related complications, respiratory depression, or death.”

DQE developed the Sentry Shield line of personal protective kits to protect police officers and first responders from white powdery substances that could contain fentanyl, carfentanil, or other powerful opioid-based substances. The Sentry Shield kits are configured based on the recommendations of the National Institutes of Occupational Safety & Health (NIOSH) and the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).

The Center for Domestic Preparedness’ Chemical, Ordnance, Biological and Radiological Training Facility (COBRATF) Biological program has been accredited by the American Biological Safety Association (ABSA) International.

The Tauri Group has been awarded two task orders under the Joint Program Executive Office for Chemical and Biological Defense (JPEO-CBD) Omnibus Program Engineering and Technical Support (OPETS) Medical Domain.

This contract and task orders provide support services to the Department of Defense’s JPEO-CBD for production and fielding of chemical and biological defense materials. The task order A award will provide Bioengineers and Scientists to support the JPEO-CBD Joint Project Manager (JPM) Medical Countermeasures Systems, JPM Protection, and JPM Guardian.

Radiation Shield Technologies, noted as the only manufacturer offering personal protection gear that is proven to provide protection against ionizing radiation, chemical and biological threats as well as heat stress, is reporting an increase in direct sales to civilians in the U.S. and worldwide, particularly in South Korea, of the Demron personal-protection gear traditionally used by first responders and other safety professionals.

Siga Technologies have received the good news that the FDA has greed to expedite its review of their new Smallpox treatment TPOXX®. FDA reviews usually take 10 months but in this instance they have agreed to complete the review of TPOXX® in only 6 months.

Laboratory and animal tests suggest that SIGA’s investigational countermeasure TPOXX® (USAN tecovirimat, ST-246®)*, blocks the ability of the virus to spread, thus preventing disease symptoms in animal models of smallpox in which TPOXX has been tested to date.

Siga, which is headquartered in New York and maintains research laboratories in Corvallis, has already delivered 2 million courses of its smallpox treatment to the Strategic National Stockpile under a $433 million contract with the U.S. Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority.

On January 9th 2018, Ludovic Ouvry attended the Lyon Chamber of Commerce for a day dedicated to the 2018 calls for Security in the H2020 program.
The objective of this day is to enable the actors of research and innovation in security to inform themselves, to exchange ideas together and to prepare for security calls for projects. Presentations at this meeting included: The involvement of end-users in European projects; the French security strategy, the organization implemented and the results of the 2017 security calls; the Security Challenge Program in Horizon 2020 and the 2018 Calls for this Challenge; and the public support systems.

In the presence of Mr Jérôme Perrin from the Ministry of the Interior (ministerial delegation to the security industries), the French national security contact points PCN ( Mr Armand NACHEF) and the SAFE Cluster focusing on global security ( Jean Michel DUMAZ) the ENCIRCLE project was presented along with its level of progress. The audience of 60, mainly industrial and some academics, was made aware of the integration approach in both communities.

DARPA is proposing an ambitious new program to counter proliferation of weapons of mass destruction: checking suspects’ epigenetic markers to track history of exposure to associated materials.
The endgame of this program, called Epigenetic Characterization and Observation (ECHO), is the creation of a field-deployable system that could analyze someone’s epigenome and identify markers of whether or not–in that person’s entire lifetime–been exposed to WMD-associated materials.